Re: "It's fake smart."
I think that 'fake' smart is a little unfair and perhaps 'different' smart would be a better way of describing it.
The idea that it's textures that are being recognised, rather than shapes, makes a lot of sense to me. When I've tried to model neural networks* in my mind it wasn't clear how shape recognition could work but I can see how texture recognition might be achieved - shapes don't really have patterns whereas textures pretty much are patterns, and it's pattern recognition that NNs are good at.
It also fits with an old article here on the Reg about a NN that was first trained to recognise cats and was then told to generate a cat image based upon its learned recognition criteria; what it came up with was not a picture of a cat but a seamless patchwork of bits of cat.
* I believe the convolutional bit is more to do with reducing the data instead of processing it differently.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
